I came up with an algorithm inspired by bzip's algorithm of generating all substrings and then sorting them. I tried yours on a list of 20 strings of 1000 chars, and it ran in 153 seconds. Mine ran in 0.67 seconds, yielding the same results. 30 strings of 3000 chars runs in 20.3 seconds on mine; scaling up from there starts to get painful, but I would guess the OP's requirement of 300 strings of 3000 chars would run in under an hour, if it had plenty of memory (there will be 900,000 strings averaging 1500 chars in length).

There is one difference between your algorithm and Grandfather's. His code returns the longest substring for each pair of input strings.

With my original data set your code returns one substring. Grandfather's code returned over three thousand (where $minmatch = 256). On the other hand your code finds multiple occurrences of the longest common substrings, if they all have the same length, which I like.

When putting a smiley right before a closing parenthesis, do you:

Use two parentheses: (Like this: :) )
Use one parenthesis: (Like this: :)
Reverse direction of the smiley: (Like this: (: )
Use angle/square brackets instead of parentheses
Use C-style commenting to set the smiley off from the closing parenthesis
Make the smiley a dunce: (:>
I disapprove of emoticons
Other